Two poems about the same thing

Here are two poems about timepieces which are also (of course) about mutability. The first is I assume about a pocket-watch (wrist watches did not become popular until the 1920s) and it's slightly surprising, given the author's usual subject matter. The style is immediately recognisable though - it's by Gerard Manley Hopkins:

To His Watch

Mortal my mate, bearing my rock-a-heart
Warm beat with cold beat company, shall I
Earlier or you fail at our force, and lie
The ruins of, rifled, once a world of art?
The telling time our task is; time’s some part,
Not all, but we were framed to fail and die—
One spell and well that one. There, ah thereby
Is comfort’s carol of all or woe’s worst smart.

Field-flown, the departed day no morning brings
Saying ‘This was yours’ with her, but new one, worse,
And then that last and shortest…

(The poem doesn't end - it just stops, reminding me of a gloomy inscription, reportedly devised by Lewis Carroll, to be engraved on the base of a sundial: Vulnerant omnes; ultima necat - each one wounds, the last one kills.) 

The second poem is by W. S. Graham, who was a close friend of the painter Roger Hilton who lived in a cottage in the Cornish village of Botallack. When Hilton died in 1975 Graham inherited his wristwatch, and this prompted one of his best poems.

Hilton in Bed, Botallack, Photograph by Jorge Lewinski (1974)
© The Lewinski Archive at Chatsworth
www.jorgelewinski.com

Lines on Roger Hilton's watch


Which I was given because
I loved him and we had
Terrible times together.

O tarnished ticking time
Piece with your bent hand,
You must be used to being
Looked at suddenly
In the middle of the night
When he switched the light on
Beside his bed. I hope
You told him the best time
When he lifted you up
To meet the Hilton gaze.

I lift you up from the mantle
Piece here in my house
Wearing your verdigris.
At least I kept you wound
And put my ear to you
To hear Botallack tick.

You realize your master
Has relinquished you
And gone to lie under
The ground at St Just.

Tell me the time. The time
Is Botallack o'clock.
This is the dead of night.

He switches the light on
To find a cigarette
And pours himself a Teachers.
He picks me up and holds me
Near his lonely face
To see my hands. He thinks
He is not being watched.

The images of his dream
Are still about his face
As he spits and tries not
To remember where he was.

I am only a watch
And pray time hastes away.
I think I am running down.

Watch, it is time I wound
You up again. I am
Very much not your dear
Last master but we had
Terrible times together.


© W. S. Graham Collected Poems published by Faber and Faber

Chimerica

I once facetiously advanced the theory that Lee Harvey Oswald's intended target in Dallas that day wasn't the President but the First Lady, Jackie Kennedy. He missed, and what should have been a murder became an assassination. Why anyone would want to murder Jackie Kennedy is an issue yet to be resolved, of course. Let the conspiracy theorists scramble - I've done the spadework.

This theory came back to me last Saturday at the Almeida Theatre in Islington, as I watched the acclaimed new play by Lucy Kirkwood - Chimerica.

Like the rest of the audience I was bowled over by the brilliant technology employed in the production - a house-sized revolving cube, on which were projected photographic contact prints, and within which spaces constantly changed their appearance. The effect was consistently astounding - the cube became smoothly and in swift succession an airport terminal, an aeroplane interior, a night club, a frozen fish warehouse, apartments in Beijing and New York, a newspaper office, a police cell, a florists. Nothing, it seems, is beyond representation on stage. The performances were mostly very good and the Chinese lead, Benedict Wong, quite brilliant. British actors doing American accents are never easy on the ear, but this cast pretty much pulled it off and two of the male leads did something more - they moved and breathed and stood like Americans. This is unusual - something to do with the shoulders, the tilt of the head, the way they act when they have no lines to say.

The narrative drive in Chimerica centres on the identity of the so-called Tank Man, the lone figure with two plastic shopping bags who appears single-handedly to stand up to a platoon of tanks during the events in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The lead character is a fictitious American photo-journalist who took one of the shots of the Tank Man at the time and, more than two decades later, wants to trace his whereabouts. (I learned today that the moment was in fact captured by four different photo-journalists present in Beijing on that day, so the creation of a fifth is hardly stretching the truth.)

The play argues, and very persuasively, that the real hero of that encounter was not the lone protestor but the commander of the first tank, who, in breach of orders and at great personal risk, failed to run over the protestor and take control of the Square. His decision not to obey orders has never been the focus of our attention - but surely it should be. Just as if Nazi death camp guards had thrown down their rifles and flatly refused to carry out the acts of barbarism expected of them. They were, infamously, only obeying orders. The anonymous tank commander was only disobeying orders and is a lesson for us all - but has been  no more the focus of our interest than Jackie Kennedy in Dealey Plaza.

The Tank Commander was (according to the play) executed following a summary court martial and his family also punished. I was completely persuaded by this entirely hypothetical interpretation of the moment and the underlying implication that we in the West missed the real, if non-explicit, import of the confrontation - what Roland Barthes, talking about photographs, usefully called the punctum. In the images below, to adopt Barthes' term, the ostensible subject is the protester, but the punctum is the barely-visible head of the tank commander emerging from the turret, not the frail figure on the ground.

Chimerica has one further surprise up its sleeve, a revelatory moment that I shan't give away but which alone was worth price of a ticket ten times over. If the function of art is to make the familiar strange, to make us see things in a fresh light, then Chimerica is the real thing. A brilliant achievement.

Favourite snatches (7)

From The Wind in the Willows, the moment when Ratty arrives staggering under the weight of 'a fat, wicker luncheon-basket':

‘Shove that under your feet,’ he observed to the Mole, as he passed it down into the boat. Then he untied the painter and took the sculls again.

‘What’s inside it?’ asked the Mole, wriggling with curiosity.

‘There’s cold chicken inside it,’ replied the Rat briefly; 'coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscresssandwidgespottedmeat
gingerbeerlemonadesodawater––’

‘O stop, stop,’ cried Mole in ecstasies: ‘This is too much!’

Since first reading this passage in The Wind in the Willows as a child I've casually collected unpunctuated sentences, a favourite being: "Iveneverbeensoinsultedinmyentirelife", a blustering outburst by Edgar Naylor, the unlikable hero of Cyril Connolly's only novel The Rock Pool (the perfect book to take on any holiday, by the way). 

Which brings us, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, back to Finnegans Wake, which includes ten unpunctuated one-hundred letter words each suggesting the sound of thunder - this being, in the cosmology adapted by Joyce from the 15th century Florentine savant Gianbattista Vico, a signal that the whole cycle of history is about to begin again.

Marshall McLuhan wrote: "There are ten thunders in the Wake. Each is a cryptogram or codified explanation of the thundering and reverberating consequences of the major technological changes in all human history. When a tribal man hears thunder, he says, 'What did he say that time?', as automatically as we say 'Gesundheit.'"

Here's what the ten thunderclaps say, in all their polyglot glory. It's fun (when you have something better to do) to break them down into constituent words, like Ratty's breathless picnic menu.

1. Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk

2.

Perkodhuskurunbarggruauyagokgorlayorgromgremmitghundhurthrumathunaradidillifaititillibumullunukkunun

3.

Klikkaklakkaklaskaklopatzklatschabattacreppycrottygraddaghsemmihsammihnouithappluddyappladdypkonpkot

4.

Bladyughfoulmoecklenburgwhurawhorascortastrumpapornanennykocksapastippatappatupperstrippuckputtanach

5.

Thingcrooklyexineverypasturesixdixlikencehimaroundhersthemaggerbykinkinkankanwithdownmindlookingated

6.

Lukkedoerendunandurraskewdylooshoofermoyportertooryzooysphalnabortansporthaokansakroidverjkapakkapuk

7. Bothallchoractorschumminaroundgansumuminarumdrumstrumtruminahumptadumpwaultopoofoolooderamaunsturnup

8. Pappappapparrassannuaragheallachnatullaghmonganmacmacmacwhackfalltherdebblenonthedubblandaddydoodled

9.

Husstenhasstencaffincoffintussemtossemdamandamnacosaghcusaghhobixhatouxpeswchbechoscashlcarcarcaract

10.

Ullhodturdenweirmudgaardgringnirurdrmolnirfenrirlukkilokkibaugimandodrrerinsurtkrinmgernrackinarockar

That last word has 101 letters - the combined total of the Wake's thunderwords being the numerical palindrome 1001, connecting the unending cycle of the book with The Arabian Nights. Crafty beggar, Joyce.

Favourite snatches (6)

Here's a favourite snatch - it's Dr Johnson, no less, on the Twickenham grotto built by the poet

Alexander Pope in the early 1720s. Flush with earnings from his translation of Homer's Iliad, Pope had moved to Twickenham with his mother in 1719 and began to develop a riverside property. His Villa (now demolished) was separated from his garden (also lost) by a road and an elaborately decorated tunnel - or grotto - was his solution. Here's Dr Johnson, booming inimitably:

A grotto is not often the wish or pleasure of an Englishman, who has more frequent need to solicit rather than exclude the sun, but Pope's excavation was requisite as an entrance to his garden, and, as some men try to be proud of their defects, he extracted an ornament from an inconvenience, and vanity produced a grotto where necessity enforced a passage.

I was very surprised to learn today that the grotto still exists, although in a sorry state - an amazing survival. For a good website with pictures click here.

Book 4 of Pope's Dunciad describes some of the figures seated beneath the throne of Dulness. It's wonderful, and offered to my readers as a bonus favourite snatch:

Beneath her foot-stool, Science groans in Chains,

And Wit dreads Exile, Penalties and Pains.

There foam'd rebellious Logic, gagg'd and bound,

There, stript, fair Rhet'ric languish'd on the ground;

His blunted Arms by Sophistry are born, 

And shameless Billingsgate her Robes adorn.

Morality, by her false Guardians drawn,

Chicane in Furs, and Casuistry in Lawn, 

Gasps, as they straiten at each end the cord,

And dies, when Dulness gives her Page the word.

'Chicane in Furs, and Casuistry in Lawn' snags the memory before the meaning is clear.

On general knowledge

An old blog from a few years ago, when the hobgoblin Pob-lookalike Michael Gove was merely Education Secretary.

___________________________________

I listened recently to a quiz programme on BBC Radio 4 called The Third Degree in which two teams of undergraduates and dons from the same university competed to answer questions set by the chairman, a stand-up comedian.

One round involved the teams choosing between 'highbrow' and 'lowbrow' questions based on a chosen subject. So, for instance, the choice when it came to 'Jordan' might range from questions about Petra and 'the rose-red city half as old as time' (in John Burgon's fine line) and the 'glamour model' who has published more books than she'll ever read. The former representing (in the producer's imagination) a highbrow factoid, the latter something we're all expected to know about.

The ostensibly highbrow questions were without exception middlebrow, while the lowbrow questions were all to do with celebrity in one form or another, because 'lowbrow' no longer refers to popular culture in the broadest sense, but to a particularly garish and shallow manifestation of populism. The undergraduates failed consistently on all the 'highbrow' questions (not knowing, for instance, that Dedalus was the father of Icarus, or that Prufrock measured out his life in coffee spoons, or that ... but you get the idea.)

The dons fared better, as one might expect, on the allegedly highbrow items but (equally predictably) less so when it came to the lowbrow options, with condescending jeers from the audience every time they revealed their ignorance about the doings of Justin Bieber and the cast of Eastenders.

Introducing another round, the chairman elicited easy laughter from the audience when he said that the answers to the next question should be in Latin. The question was about the Canonical hours, the division of the day into periods of prayer - Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, Nones, Vespers and Compline. These are certainly less well-known than they once were as our society no longer centres around acts of Christian worship, although I happen to know them because they formed part of my haphazard education and I can't for a moment imagine what it must be like not to have this knowledge as part of my cultural baggage, at least when it comes to solving crossword clues, playing Scrabble or feeling annoyed by radio programmes. That the Canonical hours are now seen as a backwater of general knowledge is not surprising - what is surprising and worrying is the derision directed at those of us who happen to know them. What's going on? What's gone wrong?

Forty years ago a minimum 'O' level in Latin was necessary for anyone wishing to study for a Humanities degree at any university. I'm not saying this was a Good Thing, or a Bad Thing, but it was certainly a Thing. And accompanying that sort of education (or, if you must call it schooling, schooling) came a whole bunch of other stuff which broadly speaking equipped the learner with a packed lumber-room of information, some utile, some arcane, all worth knowing, or so we used to think, for its own sake.

There has been, in my lifetime and quite recently, a paradigm shift. What was once valued for its own sake as general knowledge (about geography and history and science and literature and so on) has been almost entirely supplanted by the new currency of common knowledge. What was once worth knowing has now been supplanted by trivial stuff that everyone is expected to know. At the same time there have never been so many formats in which a lack of general knowledge can be showcased and, weirdly, rewarded. What happens now (at least in practically all television and radio competitions that endeavour to assess various kinds of knowledge) is that anyone with a reasonable level of general knowledge is likely to be derided as a geek or nerd or whatever the discriminatory term is, while the competitor who knows Lady Gaga's real name or Who Killed J.R. is rewarded.

Some years ago at a conference I was genially derided by a colleague for chatting to, without recognising, a man called Sven Goran-Erikson (who was at the time manager of the England football team and, to be sure, quite famous). My colleague was amused by what he saw as my other-worldly ignorance. Yet if (in a purely hypothetical situation) he had failed in my company to identify (say) President Roosevelt or Franz Kafka or Sylvia Plath or Noam Chomsky, I'd have pitied the poor fool but would certainly not have mocked him, as he mocked me, not least because I happen to have better manners than he does. 

What's happening today is the commodification of ignorance - the fact that the stupid and docile (and I hasten to include myself in their number when it comes to any subject outside my general knowledge, which is to say most subjects) are now able to win approval, among their peers and in the media, by being part of a notional majority who share a common knowledge but lack, and are consequently encouraged to be sceptical about, the value and utility of general knowledge - of knowledge for its own sake. Call it the Clarkson Paradox after the overbearing and culturally-barren television presenter.

Michael Gove, our Minister for Education, embodies the Clarkson Paradox in his desire for the cultivation of hard facts, but in doing so is trying to have his cake and eat it - to make general knowledge and common knowledge the same thing. This is not ever likely to happen as the horse has bolted and the cat is out of the bag. It is in any case notoriously difficult to settle on what is worth knowing in our national narrative, and therefore what knowledge to impart and how to assess that knowledge. Gove's reactionary approach is to re-introduce rote-learning, and he has been roundly condemned by teachers' unions for this. I think there's a place for memorisation in education as it happens, though not necessarily for testing the results, but this will get me on to a favourite hobby horse - that the arts in general and literature in particular should certainly feature prominently on the national curriculum, be subjects for compulsory study and understanding but never, ever be the subject of examination. Some things shouldn't be tested, simply experienced and if possible enjoyed. Everybody knows that - it's common knowledge.

Favourite snatches (5)

Cyril Connolly once challenged W. H. Auden to write a poem that would make him cry. The result was The Fall of Rome, which you'll probably know. The last time I read something that made me feel as though I had something in my eye it was this poem by W. S. Graham, about his father.


To Alexander Graham

Lying asleep walking
Last night I met my father
Who seemed pleased to see me.
He wanted to speak. I saw
His mouth saying something
But the dream had no sound.

We were surrounded by
Laid-up paddle steamers
In The Old Quay in Greenock.
I smelt the tar and the ropes.

It seemed that I was standing
Beside the big iron cannon
The tugs used to tie up to
When I was a boy. I turned
To see Dad standing just
Across the causeway under
That one lamp they keep on.

He recognised me immediately.
I could see that. He was
The handsome, same age
With his good brows as when
He would take me on Sundays
Saying we’ll go for a walk.

Dad, what am I doing here?
What is it I am doing now?
Are you proud of me?
Going away, I knew
You wanted to tell me something.

You stopped and almost turned back
To say something. My father,
I try to be the best
In you you give me always.

Lying asleep turning
Round in the quay-lit dark
It was my father standing
As real as life. I smelt
The quay’s tar and the ropes.

I think he wanted to speak.
But the dream had no sound.
I think I must have loved him.



W. S. Graham, “To Alexander Graham” from Collected Poems 1942-1977 (London: Faber, 1979). 
Copyright The Estate of W. S. Graham.



'That one lamp they keep on' is a favourite line. What could be simpler? More moving?

Mick McManus, RIP

Mick McManus died last month, aged 93.

He was a fixture of my childhood Saturday afternoons, when I would watch televised wrestling with my grandmother for forty minutes before the football results came on and she switched off. She disliked all other sports, but all-in wresting was a guilty pleasure of hers. McManus was her favourite. He resembled the actor Ian Hendry and, in later years, the tubby comedian Terry Scott. With his died black hair, black trunks and unhealthy-looking body he was always cast as the bad guy, "The Man You Love to Hate", the one who broke all the rules while the referee's back was turned. His catch-phrase, a very good one by any standards, was "Not the ears! Not the ears!"

They were all terrific entertainers, those 1970s teatime wresters - Jackie 'Mr T.V.' Pallo from Islington, the lumbering Giant Haystacks, the soft-hearted crowd-pleaser Big Daddy (whose real name, we all knew, was Shirley Crabtree) and the terrifying, masked weirdo Kendo Nagasaki. The latter was unmasked by Big Daddy in 1975, a bizarre moment you can watch here. (Any cultural anthropologists out there will need a pen and paper.) McManus was a consistently reliable, no-nonsense performer, his trademark short range forearm jabs culminating in the finishing move of a Boston Crab. 'A dreadful man' said my grandmother, approvingly. 

The ITV commentator was Kent Walton, who was good at his job in the same way the disc jockey Alan 'Fluff' Freeman was good at doing the chart countdown - they both made it seem to matter. Walton's top lip was permanently malformed from long years of close-up ringside microphone wrangling at rowdy venues in Croydon, Birkenhead, Belfast and Gravesend.

After retiring from what Walton liked to call 'the grunt 'n' grapple game' McManus ran a pub in South London and became an expert in antique porcelain. He will be missed.